


The Customer Itsn't Always Right

by Silex



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fantasy, Gen, Humor, Retail Jobs, Trick or Treat: Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-05 01:18:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16357880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Elfleda typically enjoys her job at the little magic shop that she inherited from her uncles, but sometimes the customer complaints getinteresting.





	The Customer Itsn't Always Right

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Resilur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Resilur/gifts).



Elfleda was making a last lap of Belzak and Bodkin’s Magical Item Emporium, straightening the merchandise and seeing what they were running low on. The love potions section was going to need restocking, they were low on No. 9 and Funky Cold Medina which were always best sellers, but that could wait until tomorrow when the rest of the shipment arrived. The bottles on that particular rack were exceptionally popular, even though they were clearly labeled as wine and the instructions that came with them were for cooking a romantic dinner for two. She figured that people liked them for the novelty value. And it didn’t hurt that one of the local vineyards had liked the idea and started getting custom labels printed for the bottles she sold.

They were one of the few products that she’d never had any complaints about, though that might have been because she’d only recently begun carrying wine.

The little silver bell over the door jangled merrily and Elfleda froze.

Last minute customers meant one of two things, a huge sale that would take an hour of talking to ring out, or someone who wanted to talk her ear off and only purchase one or two little things. Either way it meant she wouldn’t be closing on time.

“Hello?” Someone bellowed from the door, “The door’s unlocked so I know you’re still open.”

“I’m in the back,” Elfleda tried to keep her voice cheerful, though she winced inwardly. Scarcely a week went by without at least one complaint. This week there had already been three and it was only Tuesday, “I’ll be there in a moment.”

Finishing counting the bottles on the wine rack, noting that the rosés were selling particularly well this month, she hurried to the front of the store.

There was a heavy thud, a bit of clattering and a fair amount of muffled cursing as the last minute customer stomped into the store.

Elfleda fought back a curse of her own. It always happened, no matter how clearly the items were labeled, no matter how many times she reminded customers, there were always people who didn’t pay attention to the instructions.

Sure enough, when she turned around the last row of shelves, there was a minotaur standing at the counter, hunched down to prevent his horns from scraping against the ceiling.

“Are you sure you don’t want the antique store in the next town over?” She inquired helpfully, hoping that the minotaur wasn’t one of her customers, but had instead come looking for help after purchasing a cursed artifact elsewhere. Sending the proverbial bull to a china shop might not have been a good idea, but she wanted to get home. There was a reason she didn’t deal in antiques after all. In fact when she inherited the shop from her uncles she’d seen to it that most of the more dangerous inventory was put into storage or sold off to specialized collectors rather than risk trouble with the general public.

Her hopes were dashed when the minotaur held up a small amber colored bottle.

“The receipt was from here,” he snorted, shaking his head angrily.

He tossed the bottle to her and she caught it and looked it over. It was a fairly standard beauty potion, one that she’d been considering discontinuing, not because of complaints from people who purchased it, but from the shoppers that came in to complain rather than to buy. They’d rail about unrealistic standards of physical attractiveness and how it was biased, deceitful or unfair to let or expect a woman to use something like that.

Of course they never read the label and saw that it was a perfume with a fairly neutral scent, brewed to enhance the confidence of the wearer, because confidence was one thing that had remained attractive throughout the ages even as standards of beauty changed.

“What happened?” Elfleda asked, keeping her distance. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d been attacked by an irate customer, but a minotaur wasn’t a typical customer. In fact, she would have remembered one stopping in unless…

No, that was a special kind of stupid.

One of the ingredients of the perfume was minotaur musk, but no one in their right mind would drink a bottle of perfume…

“I’m going to kill Russ,” the minotaur grumbled, then composed himself, “Last night we were hanging out and I asked Russ to help me with the drinks.”

Elfleda braced herself. It sounded like it was going be a long story, as they often were.

“Russ, I never should have asked him, he calls the absinthe asbestos. Fucking asbestos!” the minotaur rolled his eyes at the thought, “But because he said he wanted to try something new I asked him to get the elderflower liquor with the chiles soaking in it. He asks me ‘which bottle is that?’, like they sell that stuff bottled! I tell him it’s the little jar in the cabinet on the shelf above the bottles. Directly above the bottles. So what does he do? He stands up and grabs that off the top shelf.”

He pointed angrily at the bottle Elfleda was holding.

“I’m sorry you have idiot friends?” She offered, not sure where the complaint was going. She was sure that he’d bring it back to her, they always did.

“Yeah, so by that point I was kind of pissed, told him that the glass was on the counter, because I was making tea for Trina because she doesn’t drink, and that he should just put an ounce of the liquor in it and be done with it,” the minotaur snorted again, “So what does he do? He pours that whole bottle in it and then gets himself a hard cider out of the fridge. Afterwards, when everyone went home for the night, I saw what I thought was his drink was still there, and not wanting it to go to waste I pounded the thing. The next morning I woke up like this, found the empty bottle and put two and two together.”

“I see,” Elfleda rubbed her temples, trying to figure out how to solve the problem.

“So I was wondering,” the minotaur continued, “How long’s it going to take for this to wear off because this could be pretty fucking useful tomorrow at the football game. And do you have anything I can spike Russ’ drink with next time that’ll do something like make his hair fall out? Because he deserves it.”

**Author's Note:**

> The drink mentioned in the story is an actual drink, a cocktail called 'Tough to Hear'.


End file.
